Last week in Australia was National Science Week, a nation-wide celebration of science and technology via three key pathways. Pathway one is to inspire the general public to be involved in science – creating new knowledge – through engaging activities such as Citizen Science. This year’s Citizen Scientists are identifying Australian wildlife that are featured […]
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The deadly selfie game – the thrill to end all thrills | The Conversation
[SB] This post by Amanda du Preez (University of Pretoria) originally appeared on The Conversation Africa on May 18 2016, and is republished in its entirety under a Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives licence. According to the popular press it was more likely in 2015 for a person to die while taking a selfie than to be killed […]
The academic publishing process: A lesson in antifragility
Image: Mosaico Trabajos Hércules (M.A.N. Madrid) 02 by Luis García under CC BY SA 2.0 “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let […]
Concussion in sport: Changing the “Culture”
Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 [SB] Concussion remains the current hot topic in sports injury prevention. Injury Prevention has published many an article on the topic, including the recent An examination of concussion education programmes: a scoping review methodology. I have blogged about this here too. I have invited Dr Johna Register-Mihalik (follow her […]
Fatality Free Friday | Road Safety | Australia
Today is #FatalityFreeFriday. Lets aim for ZERO #fatalities every day #roadsafety #TowardsZero pic.twitter.com/g47E00aFEh — CARRS-Q (@CARRS_Q) May 26, 2016 Fatality Free Friday is an initiative that started in Australia in 2007, and the campaign has continued to expand its operation and is now recognised as Australia’s only national community based road safety program. Road safety is […]
Book Review: Take Control of ICloud (Joe Kissell)
If you are anything like me and think you know enough about most aspects of the world of computers, think again. I recently was doing some work on old photos and had reason to consider whether I should use ICloud. I was uncertain how best to store the photos and, specifically, how to decide between […]
On turning journal articles into blog posts
Typing by Sebastien Wiertz CC BY 2.0 Blogging can be a divisive topic amongst academics. It has been called frivolous, and a distraction from ‘real’ work by some – whilst others wax lyrically that it is the real work. Fact is: Social media and blogs are not just add-ons to academic research, but a simple reflection of […]
I love a sunburnt country
I received an email this week from a friend and colleague, alerting me to a report recently released by the Royal Flying Doctor Service: The Royal Flying Doctor Service: Responding to injuries in remote and rural Australia. The reports on falls, burns, poisonings, transport accidents, workplace injuries, drownings, self-harm and assault, with Australians living in remote and […]
Another editor hits the dust
We recently discovered that the Canadian Medical Association has fired the editor of its flagship journal, the CMAJ, for reasons that are entirely unclear and also dismissed the oversight committee put in place after the previous editor was fired. I am deeply disturbed. What follows is what I posted on WAME in response to comments […]
p values misused
Don’t ask me why but I follow Retraction Watch faithfully. Recently there was a posting about p values I thought would be of interest to our readers and contributors. Here it is verbatim. “We’re using a common statistical test all wrong. Statisticians want to fix that. After reading too many papers that either are not […]